Toby Harnden was the Daily Telegraph's US Editor, based in Washington DC, from 2006 to 2011. Click here for Toby's website. Follow him on Twitter here @tobyharnden and on Facebook here. He is the author of the bestselling book Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Defining Story Britain's War in Afghanistan.

Flaw and Disorder: Where's Fred Thompson?

Much chatter among Republicans within the Beltway that Fred Thompson, who was the Great White Hope a couple of months back, might be fading in the 2008 stakes even before his presidential bid has officially begun.

Thompson is running out of time to put things right

Having intimated he would announce around July the Fourth, it seems he'd not now going to commit until September. That's leaving a summer vacuum for the press to pick apart his lobbying and legal careers – and for stories to circulate about discord within his campaign and his wife being controlling.

I think the odds against the Law & Order star and former Tennessee senator securing the nomination are now lengthening. A couple of months back, he had momentum and buzz that he could not maintain without taking the next step. So why did he blink?

I'm told that the feeling within the campaign was that they needed to hit the ground running form Day One and they just weren't ready for prime time. This included the candidate himself – apparently, there was a concern he wasn't in command of enough policy detail (he's now spending a lot of time with briefing papers).

While it was sensible to get all the ducks in a row – early mistakes in a candidacy can doom it – it seems Thompson was unprepared for quite how much excitement his initial toe-dipping would create and he was therefore not in a position to capitalise on it fully.

It also appears that his campaign team is not either as unified or as competent as it might be. While there are impressive individuals, most have not worked together before and most to not known the soon-to-be-candidate well.

Think back to George W. Bush's 2000 campaign – he had people like Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and Don Evans working for him. They had been with him for donkey's years and knew him inside out. That counts for a lot once a campaign heats up.

Thompson has no equivalent. The main power behind him is his wife Jeri – a respected and hard-working political operative but a big-campaign novice. There's already a lot of sniping against her. Is it sexism? Jealously? Who knows – but Thompson needs to stop it now.

The bottom line is that Thompson will succeed or fail based on how good he is when he gets into the race properly. Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic puts the flap in context here. Check out the video in Marc's blog – it gives a sense of Thompson's reassuring style, his greatest asset.

There are some positive signs – such as a potential Newt Gingrich endorsement that prompted this wonderful lede from Jonathan Martin of Politico: "Newt Gingrich's long, slow striptease over whether he will seek the presidency in 2008 looks like it might come to an unexpected conclusion: a date with Fred Thompson."

But the time window for Thompson will be so narrow he cannot afford any mistakes. And how many campaigns make no mistakes?